Review: Dessert Machines

Sub Title: Gimme Some Sugar: 6 Dessert Machines Tested and Rated

The best things in life are sweet. A cone at the local ice cream shop. Cotton candy at the county fair. Hot, crispy doughnuts right off the assembly line.

Wouldn't it be great if you could make your favorite desserts in the privacy of your own home? Because let's be honest, food tastes better when you're eating it on the couch in your undies.

As kitchen gadgets grow increasingly intricate, we're seeing a slew of devices that let a dedicated hands-on homebody create fairly complicated, high-quality sweet treats in a regular home kitchen. We tested some of the latest dessert-making tech to see if doing it yourself really is just as good as letting the experts (and their industrial machines) do it for you. Our suddenly larger waistlines are proof that, in most cases, the answer is yes.

Mini Doughnut Machine

It's hard to believe this little $150 machine can turn out delicious doughnuts. It weighs almost nothing given its size, and it's made almost entirely out of plastic. That may seem like a bad combination -- plastic and super-hot oil -- but it works. It just works verrry slowwwly, and it creaks like an old wooden roller coaster.

To start, you fill the machine with oil and wait for it to heat up. Then, fill the extruder with the right consistency of batter (it will only work if your "dough" is the liquidy consistency of pancake batter). Flip a few switches -- there's one to turn on the conveyor and another to turn on the extruder, so you'll really want to read the instructions closely. But after that, just walk away. Well, sort of; the little baskets that move the doughnuts through the hot oil and flip them over don't always catch correctly, so you'll need to monitor the machine's progress.

The conveyor that moves the doughnuts through the oil is painfully slow. And that's because doughnuts just take a while. But since the extruder only dispenses one doughnut at a time, and each doughnut takes about 90 seconds to cook, completing the included recipe (100 doughnuts) will take about two and a half hours.

But here's the thing. All these little finicky problems with the machine are easy to ignore. 'Cause at the end of the day you have a ton of hot, crispy, delicious, mini doughnuts. And, let's be honest: If you're gonna eat 100 doughnuts in one sitting, you're better off pacing yourself.

It's not the highest quality. It takes practice, makes a lot of noise, works at a glacial pace, and costs a bundle. But there's nothing else out there that makes hot doughnuts for you and isn't made for use in an industrial kitchen. So, it's worth the trouble.

WIRED Light for its size and very easy to carry around. The final product -- delicious, crispy, hot doughnuts -- outweigh the negatives.

TIRED Takes 2.5 hours to make 100 doughnuts. Plastic rubbing on plastic is loud and creaky. Requires reading instructions thoroughly to get everything working right. Not the most attractive tech you've put on your kitchen counter. Pricey.

Chef's Choice Waffle Cone Express

This thing is basically a miracle that plugs into the wall. Use it once, and you'll never want to eat ice cream at home again without a cone. And it takes only seconds to make that dream come true.

It's not entirely surprising that Chef's Choice would make a great kitchen gadget. Anybody who owns a set of good knives has (or should have) one of the company's knife sharpeners tucked away in a cabinet. The Waffle Cone Express ($50) is a product born of the same high-quality, easy-to-use mold.

In terms of function, it's just a smaller, thinner waffle-maker. Pour 1/3 cup of cone batter on the metal plate, close and lock the lid, then wait for the light to cycle from green, to red, and back to green. You'll learn quickly that a hot waffle can be shaped into several unique receptacles (I used a ramekin to make waffle bowls). Chef's Choice also makes a Gourmet Waffle Cone Mix -- it only requires water, and the results taste exactly like a commercial cone -- or you can experiment with your own batters.

The lid-lock makes for easy storage, and the cord wraps nicely along a track in the bottom of the iron. It's small enough to stow away in the back corner of a cabinet, a necessity for something as specialized as this. My only real complaint: the metal exterior gets incredibly hot and stays that way for a while after it turns off.

WIRED Small, compact, easy to use. Comes with a plastic cone to help shape hot waffles. Just-add-water Gourmet Waffle Mix means making waffles is almost no work at all.

TIRED Metal exterior gets very hot. Temperature control is a little wonky, so you have to practice to find your waffle color ideal.

Cuisinart Ice Cream and Gelato Maker

At-home ice cream makers are kind of a pain in the ass. Most of them have a removable bowl you have to pre-freeze for 24 hours, which takes any impulsiveness out of the process, or at least requires a permanent lease on an enormous tract of freezer real estate. Cuisinart's ICE-100 machine ($300) side-steps this limitation by utilizing a built-in compressor-freezer. All you need to do is fill the bowl, set the timer, and walk away. It's basically a reverse slow-cooker.

In addition to the traditional ice cream paddle, the Cuisinart also comes with a gelato paddle, so you can pretend your kitchen is in Italy. And, just like a backwards slow-cooker, the machine goes into standby cool mode to keep your ice cream cold after it has finished churning. For hard ice cream, you'll still need to put the finished product in your freezer. But the ice cream bowl comes with a handle, making it super easy to transport to your freezer and then to your table.

All the convenience comes at an excruciatingly high price. And all the built-in coolant systems mean it's big, loud, and, at 32 pounds (!!), not so easy to stash on the upper shelf. Still, if you have some disposable income and want to free some space in your freezer this is a fantastic upgrade to the traditional ice-cream-at-home model.

TIRED Super-expensive. Two-thirds of the gadget is taken up by tech -- making it kind of silly-looking, bulky, loud, and hard to move around.

Nostalgia Electrics Cotton Candy Maker

On the surface, this little retro-styled machine from Nostalgia Electrics (around $40) appears to be a simple, no-frills cotton candy maker. But it has one twist: You can turn any hard candy into a delicious, fluffy treat. And you haven't lived until you've eaten Werther's Originals in cotton candy form.

Just like any home version of a professional machine, the small size of this cotton candy maker means it takes a bit longer to make a big puff of cotton than the guy at the fair. You can only melt two candies at a time (too many large candies will throw off the balance of the spinning mechanism) and some candies are better than others at creating a fluff (the less sugar or smaller the candy, the longer it will take to fill up your cone). But in the end, the warm, flossy version of your favorite Jolly Rancher is definitely worth the wait.

Cleanup is mostly a breeze. Though sugar collects quite a bit around the sides of the machine, all the parts are removable, and flossed candy dissolves almost instantly in water. Two reusable plastic cones are included. Nostalgia Electrics also sells a few kits if you want to get fancy. One includes pink vanilla flossing sugar, sugar free Crystal Light hard candies, and 24 paper cones. Another has three jars of flavored sugar (vanilla, sour apple, and blue raspberry), plastic bags for storage, and four reusable plastic cones.

WIRED Easy to use and quick to clean up. Can turn your favorite hard candies into fluffy, flavored cotton. Make your own flavored sugars for custom creations.

TIRED Amount of candy that can be flossed at once is limited. Slow. Some hard candies won't melt correctly, so you'll have to experiment. They sure do take the "retro" thing seriously.

Zoku Quick Pop Maker

Zoku's frozen ice pop system is basically an ice cream machine bowl without the machine. The outer case is filled with refrigerant liquid that keeps the metal pop-shaped holes super-cold long enough to freeze any liquid you put inside. And that's the big downside: you have to keep this device in your freezer all the time if you want to make impulse pops, since the refrigerant liquid has to freeze for 24 hours to work effectively.

The good news is the Zoku is relatively compact -- it comes in one-pop ($25), two-pop ($37), and three-pop ($50) sizes -- and it can be reused a few times before it has to go back into the freezer to re-charge.

Begin by inserting the included plastic sticks into the pop slots. Pour in the fruit juice mixture of your choosing and wait about seven to nine minutes. The Zoku is so cold, and works so quickly, you can actually watch the pops freeze. Lastly, you take the special extraction tool and screw it into the top of the plastic stick until your frozen confection pops out of the mold (this takes some elbow grease).

In order to get them to freeze quickly, the finished pops will wind up a little bit thinner than store-bought ones. But because you can continue pouring juices into the mold one or two more times before you have to throw it back into the freezer, you easily end up with enough to satisfy your ice pop craving.

The Zoku has tons of accessories, most of which are useless if you don't have little kids. That said, if you're crafty, you might enjoy the tools that let you cut fruit into shapes, layer your pops with different flavors, siphon fillings into the center of pops, or dip and swirl them in chocolate. The most useful accessory by far is the recipe book, which, for $17, provides 96 pages of pops designed specifically for pouring into the Zoku molds.

WIRED Make super-simple frozen juice pops, or get complicated and create layered pops out of different liquids. Fast results, and it can go two or three rounds between freezes.

TIRED Expensive. You will need to keep it in your freezer at all times unless you're a scrupulous planner. Accessories are mostly unnecessary.

Breville Pie Press

I. Love. Pie. So I really wanted to love Breville's mini pie maker ($100). I mean, how could you go wrong? Four hot, crisp, molten little pies for your eating pleasure, all ready in under ten minutes? Sounds like a pie lover's dream come true.

Sadly, this pie press just doesn't churn out high-quality pastry goodness. The first problem is that, because the machine works so quickly, all the filling needs to be cooked ahead of time. That's fine for savory pies, but it's a strange twist for sweet fruit fillings. These types of recipes almost never call for pre-cooking, leaving chefs to guess at when the filling is ready to go. This isn't a problem for experienced pastry chefs, but those aren't the folks who will be buying this machine.

Second problem: everything in the press happens so fast that Breville recommends using store-bought frozen pastry for the bottom crust and puff pastry (?!) for the top crust. And because of the pre-cooking issue, they also recommend using store-bought filling. Which, as any self-respecting pie lover will tell you, does not a delicious homemade pie make. I experimented with making my own crusts, but it was almost impossible to get them thin enough for the press without creating a chewy crust (and the homemade pastry took much longer to cook as well).

All told, if you're someone adept at making your own homemade pies, you'll be disappointed with the pie press -- and you'll be able to turn out four mini pies on your own in the same amount of time it would take you to handcraft the ingredients for the press. If you have no skill or talent at pie-making, the fiddling and practicing necessary to get your store-bought ingredients to bake up just right will ultimately leave you better off skipping the canned filling and frozen crust at the store and just picking up a pre-made pie.

WIRED Lovely shape with a gorgeous stainless-steel housing. Included pastry cutter makes it simple to make perfect-sized pies every time. Built-in edge crimper makes the finished pies very pretty.

TIRED Works best with pre-made frozen crusts or puff pastries and store-bought filling. Deceptively heavy (10 pounds). High price for something you're not likely to use regularly -- especially with the added cost of buying all your ingredients pre-made. Not for experienced home chefs who already know how to make great pie.